Count to a Trillion
Book One of the Eschaton Sequence
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Hundreds of years in the future, after the collapse of the Western world, young Menelaus Illation Montrose grows up in what was once Texas as a gunslinging duelist for hire. But Montrose is also a mathematical genius—and a romantic who dreams of a future in which humanity rises from the ashes to take its place among the stars.
The chance to help usher in that future comes when Montrose is recruited for a manned interstellar mission to investigate an artifact of alien origin. Known as the Monument, the artifact is inscribed with data so complex, only a posthuman mind can decipher it. So Montrose does the unthinkable: he injects himself with a dangerous biochemical drug designed to boost his already formidable intellect to superhuman intelligence. It drives him mad.
Nearly two centuries later, his sanity restored, Montrose is awakened from cryo-suspension with no memory of his posthuman actions, to find Earth transformed in strange and disturbing ways, and learns that the Monument still carries a secret he must decode—one that will define humanity's true future in the universe.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Decades after the world has descended into anarchy, Menelaus Montrose dreams of making it better. He jumps at the chance to escape backward Texas, now an independent country, to participate in a daring expedition to recover antimatter from an alien relic in a nearby stellar system. Montrose's misguided self-experimentation leaves him comatose for years; when he regains consciousness, he learns his surviving crewmates have used the antimatter to conquer and reshape Earth. They have also left the planet obligated to the alien hierarchy responsible for the antimatter's creation. Wright (Orphans of Chaos) is at his best when he abandons his trite characters and cardboard terrestrial setting to contemplate the Stapledonian implications of a government able to function across the vast expanses of space and time, appealing to readers interested in glimpses of the unfathomable immensities of our universe.